1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to running multiple operating systems on a single hardware platform. More particularly, the present invention relates to simultaneously operating multiple different operating systems on the same hard drive where the multiple operating systems support different block lengths.
2. Description of Related Art
Computer system interfaces typically include an operating system. The operating system performs basic tasks, such as recognizing input, sending output, and keeping track of data and files.
In some computing environments, it is desirable to run more than one operating system on a particular hardware platform simultaneously. Different operating systems may support different block lengths, or the number of bytes per logical block address (LBA), when accessing disk storage. However, hardware platforms, such as hard drives, are typically formatted to logical block addresses of a particular size, requiring all read and write commands to or from operating systems of the hard drive to also format their commands into blocks of identical size. This means data can only be read or written using the block length that the drive was initialized to when the drive was formatted.
There are currently no known methods for accessing data from a hard drive in any block size other than the formatted block size of the hard drive.